About

I build backends and the products that sit on them, and I live in Sunnyvale.

The route

My first job was in an accounting office in Jakarta, in 2013. No software in it anywhere.

Computer science started at De Anza College in 2013. In 2015 I took a break from it and worked as a data analyst intern at Mountain Kejora Ventures in Jakarta. Then UC Irvine for a BS in Computer Science, Systems and Software, 2015 to 2017. Then San Diego, and Personitech, where I was the founding engineer and learned most of what I know by being the only person who could fix it. Then Santa Clara, and six and a half years at TuringSense.

A year into TuringSense I went back to school and kept the job: graduate coursework in Computer Software Engineering at San José State. It lasted about a year. I did not finish a degree there, and I would rather say so than let a line on a page imply otherwise.

I speak English and Bahasa Indonesia.

Other people’s classrooms

The through-line I did not plan is that I keep ending up teaching.

At De Anza I tutored with the Math Performance Success program, in three different rooms: sitting in on classes so students could grab a tutor mid-problem, group sessions of five or six going back over a concept from the lecture, and one-to-one hours students booked. The one I remember is a sixty-four-year-old woman who had come back to college because she wanted to, and logarithms and exponents, and me rebuilding my vocabulary sentence by sentence until the ideas landed. The program publishes its own results — students in it pass at rates 20 to 50% higher than comparable students in traditional sections, depending on the class. That is the program’s number, earned by a whole staff of instructors, counselors and tutors. I was one tutor in it.

Later I taught computer science fundamentals to elementary and middle schoolers at Casa de Amistad, who gave me a classroom one day a week. I picked JavaScript because it was the least in the way, wrote my own syllabus, and taught it for several weeks — and then the class ended, because attendance fell off. It was an optional class in a program whose math and English classes are things students need to pass school. Interest is a weaker force than requirement, and I did not build anything to make up the difference.

The one that worked is on the Personitech page — a group of middle and high schoolers who ended up shipping an application for a real client and presenting it to a board.

Outside of that

I cook for my church most months, sometimes for forty people and once a year for two hundred — that is its own page, and so is what else I do there.